Terrific speech. Uniting, caring, forward looking. Of course the Democrats are not interested in uniting. I cannot remember a year when the opposing party behaved so badly. They went to great lengths to make clear their hatred for our country and this president.

Progressives’ plain rudeness was on national display. Leftist comments on the speech were startlingly notable for the total absence of any sense whatsoever and their plain fuming hate. Calling it “Trump Derangement Syndrome” doesn’t even begin to describe their problem. It’s not interested in our country,our future, our people — just blind fury at being out of power.

The accomplishments of this administration are clear and remarkable. No bragging there, just statement of fact. Senator Schumer remarked yesterday that President Trump should thank President Obama for repairing the economy so that it should show such improvement. Obama had no understanding of how an economy works, but that’s why the record of socialists is so dismal.

The most powerful rebuke in the speech was the line “Americans are Dreamers too.” Good reminder. The illegal immigrant “Dreamers” have shown no particular effort to adapt to or participate in this country. The few who have served in the military should be on a path to citizenship, but the ones who are out demonstrating, screaming, carrying pre-printed signs—demanding citizenship seem to have the illusion that they have fulfilled all the requirements for citizenship by simply being here at taxpayer expense. Many have dropped out of high school, contemptuous of the generosity of the country. We are not a “nation of immigrants.” We are a nation of Citizens.

One thing Dr. Hanson has often called to our attention is President Trump’s use of the word “our.” He always refers to our workers, our miners, our police officers, our military, and our people. No other president has done that.

Efforts at Unity for the good of the country, will, of course, amount to nothing. Democrats will stand ready to punish any of their fellows who do not understand that our Constitutional Republic is not meant to have anyone but Democrats in charge. It’s entirely about the power of the Ruling class, and what they can do with that power.

Davos, where the politically significant and beautiful go to meet and greet. It is the World Economic Forum, a Swiss nonprofit foundation based in Geneva, Switzerland.

The Forum engages the foremost political, business and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas. …

The Forum strives in all its efforts to demonstrate entrepreneurship in the global public interest while upholding the highest standards of governance. Moral and intellectual integrity is at the heart of everything it does….

Our activities are shaped by a unique institutional culture founded on the stakeholder theory, which asserts that an organization is accountable to all parts of society. The institution carefully blends and balances the best of many kinds of organizations, from both the public and private sectors, international organizations and academic institutions.

“I’m here to deliver a simple message: There has never been a better time to hire, to build, to invest and to grow in the United States,” Trump declared. “America is open for business and we are competitive once again.”

The president backed up this statement by remarking on signs of a strong economy. He mentioned the stock market “smashing one record after another,” and adding more than $7 trillion in new wealth since his election. “Consumer confidence, business confidence, and manufacturing confidence are the highest that they have been in many decades.”

Trump also touted the 2.4 million jobs created since his election, and argued that small business optimism is at an all-time high. “New unemployment claims are near the lowest we’ve seen in almost half a century,” he declared.

Perhaps most positively, the president noted that “African American unemployment reached the lowest rate ever recorded in the United States and so has unemployment among Hispanic Americans.”

The American economy is important to the world, and when we are doing well, most of the rest of the world is too, for America is a huge market as well, and when we’re doing well, we buy more of the world’s stuff. Teresa May’s speech was interrupted when the presidential helicopter arrived and the crowd rushed out to see.

As far as activists go, Al Gore was there to tell the rest of the world that the Earth is dying, and we only have a little time to save it, but the news keeps messing up his message. A new study in the prestigious journal Naturefinds that if CO2 in the atmosphere actually doubled, global temperature would climb at most by 3.4 degrees Celsius. Far below what the UN has been claiming.

The scientists found that the planet just isn’t as sensitive to changes in the CO2 level as they thought. Projected temperature increases have been too high. Oops! All the disaster predictions were much higher temperature increases than that. Al Gore’s doomsday predictions are bunk. On the same day the Nature study was published, NASA released its latest report on temperature, so the New York Times put the NASA study on their front page, and ignored the Nature study entirely. Of course they did. Climate scientists are now suing critics who challenge “Settled Science” (which is what their computers say).

Despite all you have heard, Global Warming is not killing the polar bears, they are multiplying happily. It’s not burning up California (you have to clear out dry, dead brush) and it doesn’t cause hurricanes either. And Governors who want to install carbon taxes, will accomplish nothing, except make your people angry, and yourself a one-term governor.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has cleaned up in part, or completely, seven of the most toxic Superfund sites in the U.S. in 2017. Of the seven sites designated for cleanup, three have been completely cleansed, while four others still require some work. This is a vast improvement over the prior year when the EPA completely cleaned one Superfund site.

“We have made it a priority to get these sites cleaned up faster and in the right way,” EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said. “By creating a streamlined task force and making major remedy decisions that hold potentially responsible parties accountable for cleanup, the Superfund program is carrying out the agency’s mission of protecting human health and the environment more every day.”

These gains by the EPA are part of a list of 21 contaminated sites that need “immediate and intense attention” our of more than 1,300 Superfund sites nationwide. The Left has been heavily criticizing Pruitt for rolling back some of Obama’s environmental regulations and reducing the reach of the agency. Pruitt said he is taking more of an environmental stewardship-focused, rather than a preventative, view of the relationship between the environment and industry. He wants to hear local voices. He said We can be about jobs and growth and still be good stewards of our environment. The last several years have been more adversarial, and there wasn’t much cleanup going on. Surely you remember the bright yellow river.

Former Vice President Al Gore has weighed in on the record cold and snow in the Eastern U.S. —” It’s bitter cold in parts of the U.S., but “climate scientist” Dr, Michael Mann explains that’s exactly what we should expect from the climate crisis” Gore wrote on Twitter on Thursday, January 4.

Back in 2000, the Independent in Britain wrote sorrowfully that “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past—Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

Climate scientist Kevin Trenberth, with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said “winter storms are a manifestation of winter, not climate change.”

Of course California’s Governor Jerry Brown blames everything on global warming —the devastating wildfires, the earlier floods and the Oroville Dam failure, he hauls it out whenever there is something that can possibly be blamed on global warming.

Ken Haapala, President of the Science and Environmental Policy Project just wrote:

The fear of carbon dioxide is largely based on long range forecasts from inadequately tested climate models that greatly overestimate the short-term temperature change that is occurring in the atmosphere, where the greenhouse effect occurs, also influenced by natural variation. The fear of carbon dioxide is promoted by relatively few scientists and a great number of supporters. Government policies based on such fears are draining the vitality of our society, which has long been marked by constant striving for improvement, for a better future. TWTW* (their newsletter) will continue to address the fear of carbon dioxide and its associated fears. It will emphasize the benefits of increased carbon dioxide and what little warming it may cause.

*The Week that Was, their newsletter, is available in a free subscription which will keep you up to date with all things scientific about the climate. Simply go the website https://sepp.organd you’ll find a spot in the header where you can subscribe. (If you use Firefox, they will tell you that SEPP has an improper certificate, but ignore them and enter the website on Bing or Google and they’ll connect you right away.) Lots of information available there.

ADDENDUM: I’m not sure if most people know that global warming exists only in computer programs, elaborate though they may be. I think they were based on programs devised to predict the stock market, but I’m not sure of that.They start with what is known about climate, which is not much, and put in a lot of “common knowledge” then some surmises and a lot of sheer guesses, and expect it to tell us what the climate will be in the next 100 years, We don’t understand the effect of clouds at all according to Dr. Roy Spencer (he’s the one who runs the satellites that give us accurate world temperatures), and though we know the action of the sun (sunspots or lack thereof) has a lot to do with it, so does the ocean. The Paris Accords were not about climate, but about transferring money from the rich nations to the poor.

After a year of impressive accomplishment, in spite of “the resistance”, Kimberly Strassel at the Wall Street Journal is offering ” A Big Beautiful Trump 2018 Issue: Civil Service Reform.” Send your message of approval to the White House! The Journal has a pay barrier, but Instapundit has the essentials.

Let 2018 be the year of civil-service reform—a root-and-branch overhaul of the government itself. Call it Operation Drain the Swamp.

When Candidate Trump first referred to “the swamp,” he was talking about the bog of Beltway lobbyists and “establishment” politicians. But President Trump’s first year in office has revealed that the real swamp is the unchecked power of those who actually run Washington: the two million members of the federal bureaucracy. That civil-servant corps was turbocharged by the Obama administration’s rule-making binge, and it now has more power—and more media enablers—than ever. We live in an administrative state, run by a left-leaning, self-interested governing class that is actively hostile to any president with a deregulatory or reform agenda.

It’s Lois Lerner, the IRS official who used her powers to silence conservative nonprofits. It’s the “anonymous” officials who leak national-security secrets daily. It’s the General Services Administration officials who turned over Trump transition emails to Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the absence of a warrant. It’s the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Leandra English, who tried to stage an agency coup. It’s the EPA’s “Scientific Integrity Official” who has taken it upon herself to investigate whether Scott Pruitt is fit to serve in the office to which he was duly appointed. It’s the thousands of staffers across the federal government who continue to pump out reports on global warming and banking regulations that undermine administration policy.

More broadly, it is a federal workforce whose pay and benefits are completely out of whack with the private sector. A 2011 American Enterprise Institute study found federal employees receive wages 14% higher than what similar workers in the private sector earn. Factor in benefits and the compensation premium leaps to 61%. Nice, huh?

Here’s a website that offers information on federal pay and benefits. It does not seem to be an official government website, but offers information for those who wish to become government employees. Do follow the link to Instapundit and read and save the invaluable Ms. Strassel’s invaluable piece.

We live in an administrative state, run by a left-leaning, self-interested governing class that is actively hostile to any president with a deregulatory or reform agenda.

You might consider reading Philip Hamburger’s recent book “Is Administrative Law Unlawful? Philip Hamburger is a leading scholar on the Constitution and a Professor of Law at Columbia University.

The headline in Newsweek magazine read “Melania Trump orders removal of the near-200-year old tree from the White House.” Misleading headline ripe for seeming to be an attack on the First Lady.

The huge Jackson Magnolia, reportedly planted by President Andrew Jackson from a sprout at his Tennessee home two hundred years ago, has become badly damaged and the steel cables that hold it up are failing. Like other living things, trees get old and die.

Experts at the National Arboretum said the tree needs to be radically trimmed. Melania Trump reviewed the findings and agreed to the cutback. She noted that visitors and journalists often stand under the tree during White House events, especially during the liftoff of Marine One. The wood from the tree will be preserved, and the White House groundskeepers have been growing offshoots of the tree that are now somewhere around eight to ten feet tall. One of those seedlings will eventually be planted in place of the historic tree.

There’s a lesson here about headlines, and some credit due to Melania Trump who ordered the right thing in response to expert opinion. Here’s the tree in 1918.